John Allen Paulos in the New York Times Book Review:

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne introduces Bayes’s theorem in her new book with a remark by John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

Bayes’s theorem, named after the 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, addresses this selfsame essential task: How should we modify our beliefs in the light of additional information? Do we cling to old assumptions long after they’ve become untenable, or abandon them too readily at the first whisper of doubt? Bayesian reasoning promises to bring our views gradually into line with reality and so has become an invaluable tool for scientists of all sorts and, indeed, for anyone who wants, putting it grandiloquently, to sync up with the universe. If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be.

At its core, Bayes’s theorem depends upon an ingenious turnabout: If you want to assess the strength of your hypothesis given the evidence, you must also assess the strength of the evidence given your hypothesis. In the face of uncertainty, a Bayesian asks three questions: How confident am I in the truth of my initial belief? On the assumption that my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate? And whether or not my original belief is true, how confident am I that the new evidence is accurate?

More here.

Laurie Penny in Penny Red:

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.”

More here.

Avner Inbar and Assaf Sharon in the Boston Review:

In the summer of 1988 Israeli authorities arrested Faisal Husseini, the Palestinian leader of East Jerusalem. The arrest came after the Israelis discovered in Husseini’s office a draft proposal for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. The document was part of an effort by the West Bank leadership to chart a political path following the eruption of the popular uprising, the intifada. Asked for his opinion of the Husseini document, the distinguished Palestinian philosopher and peace activist Sari Nusseibeh said, “The idea of declaring independence is becoming more necessary by the day. Our state will not arrive by registered mail to the main post office on Salah-al-Din street. It has to be created in stages.”

Almost a quarter century and many such stages later, the Palestinian leadership is better prepared than ever for independence. The Palestinians have been steadily building political and economic institutions in the West Bank, and just a few weeks ago Hamas and Fatah agreed to end a five-year feud and unify control of the West Bank and Gaza. Recent statements by the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund declaring that the Palestinians are ready for statehood verify the success of these efforts. Given his past positions, Nusseibeh—now President of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem—could be expected to support these developments and the declaration of Palestinian independence scheduled for September. Yet his new book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?, defies such expectations.

More here.

My best friend and fellow 3QD editor Robin Varghese got hitched to his longtime girlfriend Maeve Adams this past weekend in New York City in the classiest, most fun wedding ever. Please join me in wishing this beautiful couple a long life of married bliss!

From City Journal:

Muslim economies haven’t always been low achievers. In his seminal work The World Economy, economist Angus Maddison showed that until the twelfth century, per-capita income was much higher in the Muslim Middle East than in Europe. Beginning in the twelfth century, though, what Duke University economist Timur Kuran calls the Long Divergence began, upending this economic hierarchy, so that by Rifaa’s time, Europe had grown far more powerful and prosperous than the Arab Muslim world. A key factor in the divergence was Italian city-states’ invention of capitalism—a development that rested on certain cultural prerequisites, Stanford University’s Avner Greif observes. In the early twelfth century, two groups of merchants dominated Mediterranean sea trade: the European Genoans and the Cairo-based Maghrebis, who were Jewish but, coming originally from Baghdad, shared the cultural norms of the Arab Middle East. The Genoans outpaced the Maghrebis and eventually won the competition, Greif argues, because they invented various corporate institutions that formed the core of capitalism, including banks, bills of exchange, and joint-stock companies, which allowed them to accumulate enough capital to launch riskier but more profitable ventures. These institutions, in Greif’s account, were an outgrowth of the Genoans’ Western culture, in which people were bound not just by blood but also by contracts, including the fundamental contract of marriage. The Maghrebis’ Arab values, by contrast, meant undertaking nothing outside the family and tribe, which limited commercial expeditions’ resources and hence their reach. The bonds of blood couldn’t compete with fair, reliable institutions (see “Economics Does Not Lie,” Summer 2008).

Greif’s theory suggests that cultural differences explain economic development better than religious beliefs do. Indeed, from a strictly religious perspective, one could view Muslims as having an advantage at creating wealth. After all, Islam is the only religion founded by a trader—one who also, by the way, married a wealthy merchant.The Koran has only good words for successful businessmen. Entrepreneurs must pay a 2.5 percent tax, the zakat, to the community to support the general welfare, but otherwise can make money guilt-free. Private property is sacred, according to the Koran. All this, needless to say, contrasts with the traditional Christian attitude toward wealth, which puts the poor on the fast track to heaven and looks down in particular on merchants (recall Jesus’s driving them from the Temple).

More here.

From The New York Times:

At age 83, Marie Kolstad has a rich life. She works full time as a property manager and keeps an active social calendar, busying herself with 12 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. But one thing needed improvement, she decided: her figure. At her age, she said, “your breasts go in one direction and your brain goes in another.” So on July 22, Ms. Kolstad, a widow who lives in Orange County, Calif., underwent a three-hour breast lift with implants, which costs about $8,000. “Physically, I’m in good health, and I just feel like, why not take advantage of it?” said Ms. Kolstad. “My mother lived a long time, and I’m just taking it for granted that that will happen to me. And I want my children to be proud of what I look like.”

Ms. Kolstad is one of many septuagenarians, octogenarians and even nonagenarians who are burnishing their golden years with help from the plastic surgeon. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2010 there were 84,685 surgical procedures among patients age 65 and older. They included 26,635 face-lifts; 24,783 cosmetic eyelid operations; 6,469 liposuctions; 5,874 breast reductions; 3,875 forehead lifts; 3,339 breast lifts and 2,414 breast augmentations. Except for a brief turndown during the recession, those numbers have been rising for years now, and experts say the trend seems likely to accelerate as baby boomers begin to pass age 65. But the increase also has raised concerns about safety and the propriety of performing invasive elective surgery on older patients, who may suffer unintended physical and psychological consequences.

More here.

Epilogue

We all live in darkness, kept apart from each other
by walls easily crossed but full of fake doors;
money drawn for light spending on friends or love
our arguments
about the inexhaustible don't even graze it
just when it's time to start talking again, and take
a different road to get to the same place.
We have to get used to knowing how
to live from day to day, each one on his own
as in the best of all possible worlds.
Our dreams prove it: we're cut off.
We can feel for each other,
and thats more than enough: that's all, and it's hard
to bring our stories closer together
trimming off from the excess we are,
to get our minds off the impossible and on the things
we have in common,
and not to insist, not to insist too much:
to be a good storyteller who plays his role
between clown and preacher.

by Enrique Lihn
from The Dark Room and Other Poems
New Directions Books 1978
translation: Jonathan Cohen, John Felstiner and David Unger

Oscar Muñoz. Linea del Destino. 2006.

Still from 2 minute video, from “Imprints From a Fleeting Memorial”.

More on this Colombian artist here and here; and another video titled “Narcisso” here.

From The New Yorker:

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”

The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border.

More here.

From The Boston Globe: